If Dante were alive today, he wouldn't have needed imagination for his Inferno. He could've just…read moreaudited a semester at Miami Dade College North Campus.
Let's start with the obvious: the place is a monument to brutalism, a Cold War block of concrete so joyless it makes Soviet prisons look cozy. Every angle screams, "Give up now." The buildings look like they were designed by architects who hated students -- giant slabs of gray, windows slit like rifle ports, hallways echoing with despair. Even the pigeons look depressed.
I was here in the late 1990s as part of the Honors Program, back when Carter Burrus ran the show. Now Burrus was called a "living legend." Translation: a man with a God complex who thrived on condescension. To many, he gave a chance. To me, he smirked, "You'll never make it." Well, Carter, here I am decades later, one of your more successful students, and you're a footnote in the history of a campus that looks like the set of a Cold War dystopia. Congratulations, you were wrong -- spectacularly, gloriously wrong. If arrogance were an Olympic sport, you'd have a gold medal and still find a way to belittle the silver medalist.
The registration process? Then and now, it's a bureaucratic death march. Endless lines, blank stares, paperwork shuffled like it's 1952, and nobody ever knows what's going on. It's designed to beat the will to learn right out of you.
The parking? Forget it. Pure hell. Spaces vanish faster than financial aid, and circling those lots is like auditioning for a demolition derby. I still remember when a kid was found dead in one of those lots. That's the kind of history this place carries -- not triumph, but tragedy.
And let's talk about the area: for the past 30 years it's been sketchy at best. Step outside campus boundaries and you're reminded immediately that MDC North wasn't built to inspire--it was built to contain. Back then, even staff referred to it as "the Black campus," which says everything about Miami's ugly history of segregation and how this place became shorthand for inequity.
The only bright spot? I met my first love here. That's it. The one redeeming memory in a sea of concrete, bureaucracy, and Carter Burrus's sneer.
This place doesn't deserve two stars, or even one. It deserves a demolition order. But Yelp won't let me rate zero, so here's your single star. Not for the campus, not for Burrus, not for the architecture. That one star is for my first love -- because at least something beautiful grew out of this brutal slab of hopelessness.
Miami Dade College North Campus: where ambition goes to die, where bureaucracy thrives, and where arrogance once strutted under the banner of "Honors."
One star. Burn it down and start over.
